e to us.

Another answers: Prohibit these exchanges, and the divers advantages
with which nature has endowed these different countries, will be for us
as though they did not exist. We will have no share in the benefits
resulting from English skill, or Belgian mines, from the fertility of
the Polish soil, or the Swiss pastures; neither will we profit by the
cheapness of Spanish labor, or the heat of the Italian climate. We will
be obliged to seek by a forced and laborious production, what, by means
of exchanges, would be much more easily obtained.

Assuredly one or other of these deputies is mistaken. But which? It is
worth the trouble of examining. There lie before us two roads, one of
which leads inevitably to _wretchedness_. We must choose.

To throw off the feeling of responsibility, the answer is easy: There
are no absolute principles.

This maxim, at present so fashionable, not only pleases idleness, but
also suits ambition.

If either the theory of prohibition, or that of free trade, should
finally triumph, one little law would form our whole economical code. In
the first case this would be: _foreign trade is forbidden_; in the
second: _foreign trade is free_; and thus, many great personages would
lose their importance.

But if trade has no distinctive character, if it is capriciously useful
or injurious, and is governed by no natural law, if it finds no spur in
its usefulness, no check in its inutility, if its effects cannot be
appreciated by those who exercise it; in a word, if it has no absolute
principles,--oh! then it is necessary to deliberate, weigh, and regulate
transactions, the conditions of labor must be equalized, the level of
profits sought. This is an important charge, well calculated to give to
those who execute it, large salaries, and extensive influence.

Contemplating this great city of Paris, I have thought to myself: Here
are a million of human beings who would die in a few days, if provisions
of every kind did not flow in towards this vast metropolis. The
imagination is unable to calculate the multiplicity of objects which
to-morrow must enter its gates, to prevent the life of its inhabitants
from terminating in famine, riot, or pillage. And yet at this moment all
are asleep, without feeling one moment's uneasiness, from the
contemplation of this frightful possibility. On the other side, we see
eighty departments who have this day labored, without concert, without
mutual understanding,